Domain renewal reminders being sent on incorrect days and email template overwritten?

[Troy]

This morning I've had a couple support tickets where the client replied to a domain renewal reminder, so the subject of our reminder caught my eye because the days until expiration did not match the schedule defined in the automation settings. This also led me to look at the email template--which surprisingly got reset to the default somewhere along the line--maybe the 5.1.2 upgrade?

 

In these two cases, clients received a renewal notice for a domain expiring in 7 and 16 days. In our automation settings, we have these scheduled to be sent at 120, 90, 60 and 30 days. The fifth one is set to 0 to disable. I see no reason why a 7 day and 16 day renewal notice would have been sent.

 

We had a very detailed renewal email template that contained all kinds of information on what a client should do to renew early, or if he/she wanted to NOT renew the domain, etc. That's all been overwritten with the default. This must have happened with an upgrade and I just didn't realize it. Why would an email template ever be overwritten like that, particularly one that has been significantly reworked?

[WHMCS John]

Hi,

We always try and keep changes to the email templates to an absolute minimum, regrettably in v5.1 it was necessary to update the domain renewal email template to accommodate the new combined expiry reminders; where a single email is sent for all a client's domains expiring in the next 30 days.

 

This is preferable to a client potentially receiving hundreds of individual emails.

[Troy]

Okay, so that explains the change to the template, but was it explicitly mentioned that our template would be overwritten? I don't see anything in the change log.

 

On to the problem of reminders being sent at the wrong time now. Our system sent out 492 renewal reminders today. That's nearly 10% of the domains we have registered, and the days until expiration are all over the board, from 1 day to 120, and everything in between. Automation settings specify 120, 90, 60 and 30 only. Any idea why this is happening?

 

Anyone else want to check their activity log to see if this is happening? The entries look something like this:

 

Email Sent to [Client Name] (MediaServe: Reminder - [Domain Name] will expire in 83 days)

[WHMCS JamesX]

Anyone else want to check their activity log to see if this is happening? The entries look something like this:

 

Email Sent to [Client Name] (MediaServe: Reminder - [Domain Name] will expire in 83 days)

I haven't noticed them being sent on the wrong dates. The log entry shows in the following format:

Email Sent to FirstName LastName (Upcoming Domain Renewal Notice)